For two days at the start of October the Ontology team was in Seoul, on a booth in the Upbit Zone at Korea Blockchain Week 2026, held at Walkerhill Hotels and Resorts from 30 September to 1 October. Thank you to everyone who came by, to the Korean community who have stayed with Ontology for a long time, and to FactBlock and Upbit for running the zone. This is a short account of what we heard there and what it means for the work ahead.

The conversation at Korea Blockchain Week has moved from trading to rails

Korea Blockchain Week has a reputation as a trading crowd’s event, and this year’s programme pointed somewhere else. The main sponsor is the country’s largest exchange, and its own sessions in the zone were about regulation and market structure, public perception, and on-chain technology rather than the next listing. The underlying question was how regulated, everyday finance gets onto a chain without dragging every old problem along with it.

That is a healthy shift, and it is one Ontology was built for. When an industry stops asking what the price will do and starts asking what the plumbing looks like, the identity layer stops being a niche topic and becomes a precondition.

Every regulated rail needs an identity layer

Regulated finance runs on knowing who the customer is. Today that means the same passport scan and proof of address copied into every exchange, bank and app a person uses, each copy held by a different team to a different standard. The more of finance that moves on chain, the more copies there will be, unless the model changes.

The model Ontology has worked on since mainnet launched in 2018 is simple to state. A person is verified once by an issuer that a relying party trusts. They hold the result as a verifiable credential. When the next service needs to know they are over 18, or resident in a given country, they present that claim and nothing else. The verifier checks the signature and the credential’s status against the chain and never receives the document.

A week before Korea Blockchain Week, that model was argued for from an unexpected place. On 23 September, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce told SIFMA’s Digital Assets Conference that regulators should move away from prescriptive data collection and toward attribute-based verification, using credentials and zero-knowledge proofs to confirm facts such as age, citizenship or sanctions status without revealing the data behind them. She spoke in a personal capacity and no rule has changed. But when a sitting commissioner describes the selective disclosure model in plain terms, the gap between where regulators are heading and where Ontology already is gets noticeably smaller. We will come back to her speech in detail on Thursday.

What we showed: ONTO Wallet and a reputation people hold themselves

The product on the booth was ONTO Wallet, where identity, credentials and the data a person chooses to connect sit in one place, with the holder deciding item by item what each counterparty sees. The most concrete example running right now is gaming. The gaming reputation profile reads a player’s Steam, Twitch and Discord records with their permission and keeps the result with the player.

Gaming is where a verified, portable, user-held record found an audience first. The same infrastructure answers the KYC question above.

Four weeks of identity and data on this account

Seoul was a useful reminder that the market still files Ontology under identity and data, and that the timing for that position is better than it has been in years. Over the next four weeks this account will set out each part of it in turn:

• Privacy and KYC: what Commissioner Peirce’s speech means for credentials and zero-knowledge checks, and where Ontology fits.
• DID and data: how ONT ID and verifiable credentials work as one identity and data layer.
• Reputation: why a reputation worth trusting has to be held by the person it describes, with The Arena as the worked example.

If you met the team in Seoul, thank you for coming by. If you did not, the spring privacy series is the best place to start before Thursday.